← ALL FRESH TAKES
SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW
01
THEMATIC CENTER
choice02
NARRATIVE PRESSURE
decision03
FORM
cinematic narrative04
RECORD ANCHORS
iquique · advis’s · bayer-brocThe record for Los diablos azules yields three coordinates specific to its premise—iquique, advis’s, and bayer-broc. That vocabulary places choice at the center and gives decision its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.
Los diablos azules brings choice into contact with decision through cinematic narrative. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A strong, singular piece of cinema driven by genuine directorial conviction.
Los diablos azules (2017) arrives with the coordinates of a cinema film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Charlotte Bayer-Broc with the direction and places Valeria Perez Reyes and Gricel Jara in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.
Read as cinematic narrative, the film carries the pressure of decision. The story presents a connected set of decisions whose coherence matters more than their compliance with a familiar formula. The most precise critical test is therefore how one choice alters every option that follows. The strongest entry point is to treat the film as a connected series of decisions. Frame, duration, cast, and genre are not guarantees of success; they are the elements of a proposition whose coherence deserves examination.
The counterpoint suspends the score long enough to identify the precise choice that continues to resist the verdict. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of choice, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The twist is to suspend the score long enough to see which of the film's decisions still resists the verdict.
THE VERDICT, REFRAMED
The takeaway: consider the film's choices before adopting the verdict around it. Here, choice changes meaning under the pressure of decision.
THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT
More than 3,000 miners of Chile’s La Pampa were shot down by the national army during a demonstration in Iquique, a massacre told in Luis Advis’s 1969 cantata Santa María de Iquique. In The Blue Devils, Charlotte Bayer-Broc wanders through one of the ghost mining towns—a remote outpost in the Atacama Desert—interpreting Advis’s lament across eerily abandoned landscapes and industrial vistas. Bayer-Broc upends cinematic convention in a beguiling adaptation that is entirely her own; this medium-length musical is at once personal and political, reverent and burlesque.
Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.- Year
- 2017
- Runtime
- 48 min
- Direction
- Charlotte Bayer-Broc
- Performers
- Valeria Perez Reyes · Gricel Jara · Charlotte Bayer-Broc · Sergio Jofré